‘District 9’ Star Sharlto Copley’s Alien Encounters

Upon seeing the Peter Jackson-produced sci-fi thriller, District 9, audiences will want to know who this Sharlto Copley guy is. Then people will rush to his IMDB page to see what else he’s done. Well...he hasn’t. His role as Wikus van der Merwe, an employee of Multinational United (MNU), an alien-regulating, peacekeeping government agency in District 9, is his first role in front of the camera. The Johannesburg native and D9 director, Neill Blomkamp worked together on a short film called Alive in Joburg -- the basis for the feature -- with Copley as producer. The film drops on August 14th, but we'll give the backstory. An alien spacecraft runs out of fuel directly over the city of Johannesburg decades prior to the start of the film. Crustacean-like aliens aboard are evacuated from the ship and forced to live in an area called District 9 -- a slum on the city's outer limits, segregated from the human population. We meet jovial Wikus just as he's been promoted to head the movement of aliens to another shanty town, farther away from human contact. When he becomes infected in District 9 and starts developing alien anatomy, the film tracks his moral conflict, his confrontation with the government's obsession with alien weaponry and his utter isolation as half-man, half-alien.

Are you a sci-fi fan now and have you always been?
I’m sort of weird that way. I wouldn’t have described myself as one but I guess there are a lot of movies like, the Alien series and Terminator, that I’ve really loved and that are sci-fi. So, I guess I am if you look at a lot of my sort of favorite movies

How did you and Neill Blomkamp initially cross paths?
We met 14 or 15 years ago. He actually went to the same school as I did. I was a couple years older than him, so I’d left school already and just came across him through his work. He was doing 3D animation with a very basic software package and just doing the most incredible work. A guy who was teaching at the school said to me, ‘You gotta see what this guy is doing.’ I had a production company at the time, and so our relationship started from there, just out of a sort of mutual love for movies.

What was your initial impression when Peter Jackson signed on for the film?
What do you say to that. It’s just like—I’m sitting on the southern tip of the African continent, I’m not an actor and all of a sudden Neil wants to put me in a film as an actor. I’m a behind-the-scenes guy normally, and then it’s Peter Jackson supporting that decision as well, so it was a very strange experience. It was inspiring because you see that something like that is possible. Sitting a million miles away from Hollywood and having the opportunity to get the support that Hollywood can give a project like I’m experiencing now. And with someone like Peter who’s outside the Hollywood system, but obviously has the whole engine behind him. That was the key there. Neil recognized something in me that I didn’t see in myself. It wouldn’t have ever crossed my mind. It’s an incredible experience to be going through, and it’s humbling as well because I know that I couldnt’ve engineered that situation through planning or strategizing or anything. So, you just sit back and enjoy the experience while it lasts.

What was the conversation like between you and Neil when he proposed that he wanted you to act?
It was pretty direct. I won’t forget the conversation. I was pacing up and down on my cell phone in my apartment and he said, ‘Dude, I’m gonna offer you the lead role in the film, and Pete’s okay with that, so it’s going to happen.’ And I think I sort of said nothing for a few seconds and went, ‘Well, I accept, thanks very much.’ At that point, I had a handle on this character. Neil had shot a test with me already for this character, but I had no idea that he was actually considering me to play the character. I thought it was just part of the experimentation and thought I might be involved behind the scenes in the film.

In the short film, Alive in Joburg, were there the same racial segregation and apartheid undertones?
It was the same world. That was when Neill started creating that whole world, and I played a small part in that with a very different character. I played a sniper character. That was the seed in a way.

There’s an intense scene where you’re forced to shoot alien weapons in a test lab. What was that like?
It was incredibly intense. The guy playing the doctor was great. You can see he’s actually hitting me in the scene, and he really smacked me around. He was just really good at provoking me. The shooting [of the film] involved me often being tied down, constrained, so just wearing me down—physically and emotionally. That scene was the same thing.

How realistic was the set of District 9, itself?
The environment is a real slum. It’s real shacks that people used to live in. It was an old landfill, so literally on a square meter of ground, you would just find nails and glass and human and animal feces around. The smell of the place…that’s something that doesn’t come across on camera. It was intense.

You also eat cat food at one point…
The cat food scene wasn’t real cat food but, in hindsight, probably would have preferred real cat food. It was a horrible mix of terrible beef with fats and globules. What you see in the film is me eating, and I knew I had to sell the idea. But literally as I’m going, I hit a fat globule which triggers your vomiting reflex. Inside I was just going, ‘Oh God, I wonder if Neil’s done it on purpose to try and get me to actually throw up.’

How many days did you spend on that set?
That principal photography period was two months and we were there the vast majority of those two months. We did probably five or six weeks in total there. We also shot some pickups there, so by the end it was probably seven weeks that we spent in that environment in total.

You said that shooting wore on you, but there, did it get to the point where it was overwhelming?
It wasn’t the first time that I’d been in a township like that. It was the first time for a lot of the crew I think, and even some of the actors. I found that you just sort of get into it. Once I was in the character and I was accepting that that was going to be my day, but every night, when you go home to a 5-star hotel room, you’re very grateful that that’s not your life. It’s quite something to see that people are really living like that and I can’t forget that as I sit here with a car waiting downstairs for me. There’s just something that feels a bit odd about this whole thing.

Were you isolated within the District 9 set, or were there onlookers?
There were often. Especially kids would come when there were action scenes and weapons going and choppers coming in. The kids would get very excited and come, and they had areas for them to watch. I saw on one of the last shooting days, a kid had painted helicopters and some of the tank-like vehicles that came in on the side of his shack, and he wrote, ‘Now I’m happy,’ on the side of the shack that he lived in. It was a really inspiring thing for the community there to see a film come to town. There were a lot of people from the community involved in the production

In what sense?
They would do the security; there were people who we rented shacks from; they gave them set building jobs. For Alive in Joburg, we’d shot in similar areas, so we had a really good relationship with community leaders there.

The film can be interpreted on different levels—from a sci-fi/action film to a socially conscious docu-drama. Which do you think is most important for the overall success of the film?
The way Neil made the film is really his unique vision. I’ve always been inspired by him since I first met him. It won’t be surprising to me that the film is successful. How successful it seems or how positively people are responding is sort of surprising, but from an acting point of view, my part in that is really just trying to make a character as real as possible.

And the metaphor?
[There’s] the fundamental of human beings doing what they think is the right thing to do. I believe that everybody puts on this skin to survive in the world, and we act from that position and you believe that you’re doing the right thing, no matter what you’re doing—going to war, killing millions of people—you really think that that’s the best thing to do. I try to play my character from that point of view.  He does that, but then the reality of his situation really tests that. Pull away the things he relies on externally, and he’s only left with his own view of the world and his own mind. That gets tested and he’s really got to look at that. That was the level that I tried to eventually reach the audience on. I didn’t do it consciously but, the guy’s left with the bare essence of: what are you when all is stripped away? Everything that you rely on for your identity—that’s to me where you have the chance of having an actual connection with life—and what religion tells you and science tells you.

What was it like working with the alien arm?
It was so helpful to have that prosthetic on me. Not having acted, and going into the movie not knowing how my character was gonna be when this transformation happens—I knew him at the beginning, I didn’t know how he was gonna end—and being able to sit through makeup, zoning out listening to music would really steer me to the character. You just look at yourself and immediately there was a feeling of what that character is. It played a massive role for me in helping steer what the character was going to become

What’ d you listen to?
Mostly film scores. I was listening to the first Transformers quite a lot. I was listening to Black Hawk Down, Michael Jackson. Generally not heavy stuff, but quite sad film scores very often—Braveheart, Titanic.

What’s next? A move to Hollywood?
I don’t know. I’m very open to whatever opportunities may come along. I’ve got a couple characters that I’ve developed that I’d like to do if I get the chance. I’m just going to see where all of this goes. I certainly didn’t engineer myself here so I’m just trying to be open to what life has in store for me. I just feel very grateful to have done this to be honest.